How We Chose the Best Residential Proxies
We put each of the providers on the list through extensive evaluation. We looked at their features, spoke with their customer support, compared their pricing and user experience. We also ran rigorous performance tests, where we made hundreds of thousands of requests to see if the providers can access major websites, if they’re fast, and if they can withstand hundreds of connections at once. This list reflects our findings.
You can find detailed results in the individual reviews.
Why You Shouldn’t Use a Free Residential Proxy List
You might have noticed that the list only features paid providers. There are good reasons for that.
Free proxies might seem like a good bargain, but you should avoid them. They will most likely be slow and abused, making them effectively useless. Also, whoever controls a free proxy needs to make money. So, they can embed fake ads into your browser, log your internet usage, or even infect your computer with malware.
Be very careful when using a free residential proxy and never send any sensitive information through it.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Residential Proxies
What Is a Residential IP Proxy?
Who Has the Best Cheap Residential Proxies?
- Smartproxy – a great choice if you want residential proxies with many features, great performance, but still at a reasonable price tag.
- Storm Proxies – an even cheaper option that sacrifices some features (like location targeting) and performance.
- PacketStream – a wild card that works well but might have a small IP pool.
Where to Buy Premium Residential Proxies?
- Oxylabs – we’ve chosen it as best residential proxy provider for the second year in row. Many features, great performance, dedicated customer support.
- Luminati – another premium residential proxy provider with every feature under the sun, powerful proxy controls, and respectable performance.
- GeoSurf – a provider with quality proxies and very precise location targeting.
Can I Buy Static Residential Proxies?
Yes. More and more providers are starting to offer residential proxies that come directly from internet service providers and not end users. We feature a few of them in our list.
How long does usually residential proxy last, before the IP changes?
It depends on the proxy provider and the end user. Usually, it’s up to 10 or 30 minutes.
Would you recommend to buy a residential proxy for surveys? They’re more expensive than datacenter proxies, but some reviews say that they are better.
Offerman, residential proxies should be a better choice. They hide the fact that you’re using a proxy much better than datacenter IPs. And I’d guess some survey sites are pretty touchy about this subject.
How proxy rotating companies have so many residential ip? What are th most common ways to get them? Are there any risks using them?
Nick, residential proxies companies usually pay app developers to add code into their apps that routes connections through users’ IPs. Popular apps have millions of users. You can read more about residential proxies in our guide: https://proxyway.com/guides/residential-proxies.
Let’s say I buy a bunch of proxies from a less known provider. How to tell if proxy is residential based? What can be the main way to spot them from data center based proxies?
You can use any IP checker – look for the “ISP” field. If you can’t recognize the company, Google it and see if it’s a commercial provider or one that sells cloud services. Or you can use an IP database like IP2Location. We write more about testing proxies here: https://proxyway.com/guides/how-to-test-proxies
You should try review https://speedproxies.net/ as I tried them for the last few weeks and worked quite good, with the downside being that they don’t support socks5.
Hi Rhys, thanks for the suggestion. We’ll have a look at them.